Consolidation is Not Just for Financial Debts

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

86. A turning point in your writing career.

Quick, answer me this question first: can you have a turning point in your career if you don’t technically have a career?

Okay, for the purposes of this post we’ll presume that the word “career” refers to time and effort put into something, rather than an actual livelihood. Good? Good.

Now that we have that straightened away, I believe that the most important turning point of my writing career was when I decided to consolidate my Internet presence. If that sounds strange or confusing, let me explain. Prior to starting this blog, my Internet presence was scattered across the web in small, meaningless fragments. I had several failed webcomics, an “art” website that I rarely updated, a Tumblr account that served no purpose than to echo the art site, a handful of different blogs and online journals of which none had any real focus, and one account on pretty much every social media outlet out there. Most of this stuff served as a fun distraction from life for a little while, but in the end they were meaningless wastes of my time that accomplished nothing for me and causes unneeded levels of stress.

When I decided to start this blog I also made another decision: to cut all the other stuff loose. I kept some stuff of course; Facebook and Twitter can be useful, and my Fanfiction.net and FictionPress.com accounts are excellent hosts for stories I want to share for free. All the other stuff, however, I cut away without mercy. I deleted accounts, removed websites, and murdered meaningless wastes of time with a grim smile on my face. I had decided, finally, that I was going to focus my spare time and energy on writing and building a related social media presence. Now I blog, I tweet, I keep an eye on Facebook, and I write. And believe me, it has made all the difference. I’ve been writing on this blog (mostly) consistently for almost a year now, which is a longer stretch of consecutive time than I’ve ever stuck with one project before. In addition to that, since I made the decision to put my focus on writing I’ve written more than ever before. I’ve finished one manuscript and am getting ever closer to finishing another. I don’t think I would be exaggeration if I said that I’ve written more in the past years than in the total ten years previous. It really was an excellent decision that has seriously affected my writing “career” for the better, and I just hope I am able to keep it up for as long as it takes to turn that “career” into a career.

Epic Fail

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

37. What to do if you’ve failed at the goals you set

Have you ever heard the phrase, “You’ve just gotta get back on the horse”? If you have, you should understand what I’m about to talk about. If you haven’t, what rock have you been living under for the past hundred years?

Everyone fails at goals. Maybe not all the time, maybe some more often than others, but everyone at some point in time fails at a goal they’ve set for themselves. It’s the nature of the situation that even if we have all the best of intentions, things will go wrong, other issues will intrude, and any number of problems will arise to keep us from reaching the end of the line. Maybe it’s something we can’t control, like the fact that our new job requires us to work 70-hour weeks and we can’t work on our goal if we want to be able to eat and sleep as well. Maybe it’s something absolutely controllable, like being just plain lazy. It doesn’t really matter what the reason is. It doesn’t make you a better or worse failure. Failure is failure.

But failure is also just a chance to start over again. Failure shows us what we’ve done wrong, which issues we failed to take into consideration, and what we have to change to do better next time. If you’re a really optimistic type, failure might even be motivation to try harder. If you’re the pessimistic type, things might be a little more difficult, but the same points still apply.

And excellent example of failure and moving on from it is rejection in writing. An author can put their heart and soul – and a ridiculous number of work-hours – into a manuscript, only to have it rejected by the publisher…and then rejected by another…and another…and another. Regardless of how good a manuscript may be, it is almost certain that the author will receive multiple rejections before (hopefully) receiving a publication offer. This situation really defines the whole “get back on the horse” thing because if these authors were to just give up, where would we be? Were you aware that J.K. Rowling received 12 rejections for the first Harry Potter book before finally getting published? We all know now that the Harry Potter books are well-written, well-loved, and have ultimately sold bucketloads. So why did she receive so many rejection letters? There are any number of reasons, but the point is that she had a goal set (to publish that damn book!) and she didn’t let failure upon failure stop her from continuing to try and try, getting back on the horse again and again.

It’s definitely hard sometimes…humans are naturally depressive and easily-discouraged creatures…but if the goal you’ve set for yourself is something that’s important to you, something that you know you’re not going to be happy just giving up on, then you have to press on. If you’ve done something wrong, figure out what it is. If outside issues are holding you back, figure out a way around them. And if the problem is just timing, situation, or reliance on others to react the way you need them to, you just have to keep trying, trying, trying, until all the puzzle pieces fall into place. In the end you’ll be better off for having to have worked for it, and the end of the line will be that much more beautiful when you reach it.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself, and I hope you’re able to hold on to that hope as well. 🙂